Libyan Prime Minister of the Parliament-designate government Osama Hammad visited the Main Regional Control Centre in eastern Libya early on Sunday to oversee efforts to restore electricity following a nationwide blackout that left large parts of the country without power.
Hammad inspected the operations centre to review technical measures taken after the collapse of the national electricity grid and received briefings from engineers and technical teams working to restore supply safely and gradually.
According to the Libyan government, the Prime Minister was updated on the causes of the outage, the emergency response, and measures being implemented to prevent similar incidents in the future.
Hammad instructed officials to mobilise all available resources and accelerate maintenance work to stabilise the electricity network and ensure the uninterrupted delivery of power to citizens. He also praised engineers and technicians for their efforts to restore electricity as quickly as possible.
The widespread blackout began late on Friday after several major power generation units unexpectedly went offline, causing the national grid to lose around 1,350 megawatts of generation capacity before the entire system frequency collapsed.
As part of emergency measures, authorities in Tripoli coordinated with Egypt to activate the electricity interconnection between the two countries to help support Libya’s power network while restoration work continued.
Speaking to Reuters, Rabie Khalifa, spokesperson for the Electricity Ministry in the eastern-based government appointed by the House of Representatives, said the blackout was triggered by the sudden disconnection of the 400-kilovolt transmission line linking the Misrata and Khoms substations in western Libya.
He explained that the outage caused a reverse flow of approximately 350 megawatts that had been directed towards the western grid, triggering a cascading shutdown of key generating units, including the Gulf and Misrata power stations.
Technical teams continued working throughout the night to reconnect generating units and restore stability to the national grid. Authorities have not announced a final timeline for the complete restoration of electricity but said efforts would continue until power supplies returned to normal across Libya.
